154 Music poems

(from Henry VIII ) Orpheus with his lute made trees, And the mountain tops that freeze, Bow themselves when he did sing: To his music plants and flowers Ever sprung; as sun and showers There had made a lasting spring. Every thing that heard him play, Even the billows of the sea, Hung their heads, and then lay by. In sweet music is such art, Killing care and grief of heart Fall asleep, or hearing, die.

Live jazz at El Fresco is one guy, electric plinks, until he turns off the switch, closes his eyes, and warbles a boy’s tenor, wood-flute tones, pure séance hymns from before Christians. Rowdies at the bar stop fighting and stare as seawater washes through the room, seeping through floorboards to serpent dens. The chorus stirs spirits from family lore. Desmond, Big Miller, James MackGehee— all rise from steerage and sing with the lords. Next performance is a poet reciting, “The Luck of the Irish,” blue eyes snapping: “Once I journeyed to the Cliffs of Moher.” I follow him to a rocky precipice, pause, then jump to dizzy foam tides below, fall, keep falling into this slow, heartbreaking solo.

An accomplished ragtime pianist himself, Sam Patterson was quite close to Joplin throughout his Missouri days and on until his death in 1917. I interviewed Mr. Patterson in Manhattan at the Harlem YMCA, during one of his travels to New York. Thank you for your time, Mr. Patterson. I understand you were rather close to Mr. Joplin. Yes, you could say that. Knocked around together for years. But I am curious . . . what is it got you so bent on knowing Joplin's story? Well sir, his tunes . . . they have given me great comfort in times of need. They saved me in times voracious grief. They help me remember who I am. Where I’m from. Who I was. Yes. The music will do that—take pain and pour it someplace else for a while. I believe that his story is higher . . . deeper than the sound of his music. If people knew the sheer will that was put into each note, they might know better how those tunes, that music, let this country talk itself through its own ugliness. I want to uncover the details of his process. I’ve been talking to the people who knew him most intimately, the ones best able to carry his memory forward. So here I am, putting his story together so I can better know . . . ours. I’m hoping you will help me, sir. I see.(Laughs) You got high expectations, you know that? You don’t always get the story you want. It don’t always show the way to where you think you’re going to. And then too, it don’t change nothing if it’s the past. And ain’t nothing sound more like the past these days than some old ragtime tunes. Some things you just can’t get back. I’m here for the story as it happened. That’s all I need, Mr. Patterson. Well. You seem to know a thing or two about loss. How the world don’t slow itself one step. Whole world seems sold on racing away from whatever it’s ever been. Hooked on leaving its past behind without a trace. Especially after war. That’strue, sir. I see that you’ve seen your share. I have, sir. With the 369th. Took a chunk out of you, huh? Yes sir. Belleau Wood. Damn. You ain’t that one that won the Croix de Guerre, are you? No,sir. Just one that got a bit . . . rearranged. Well, then. Let me pour us a toast . . . Tell me. What story you want to hear? What you need to know? I want to know about his unpublished work. You helped Mr. Joplin write his final scores? Well, I was with him. I was in that room with him for days—weeks. He was pressing up on them keys like he was trying to look into a mirror and find his own face. Blood gone almost all the way bad by then. Syphilis? Yeah. That bad blooded dog. It bit him up and spat him out—left nothing but dry bones and a crop of scattered nerves—just enough for him to try and stutter out some last scraps of sound. It was rough, boy. Rough. Did he get much done? Well, in a seeming sort of way. Problem was, he couldn’t hardly start one rag before he would get up and go to the next. Was all broiled up in each one—start one sounding like morning, get halfway through, and end up switching to some chords that left a midnight taste in your mouth. Start another that blew through your bones like a winter frost, then he’d take a break and come back burning up them keys like August in a cotton field. Did he finish any of those compositions? Can’t tell you. Might have—but most of what he did finish he ended up callin child’s play. But they weren’t any child’s play, I’ll tell you that. Not any child I ever met. I know ’cause I heard him play it all together one time, just before he lit that match. You mean that he played the whole thing at once? As one piece? The whole thing. Took all them raggedy pieces and tied ’em all together with a loose string of phrase all syncopated up like a gold pocket watch. A dozen dozen little song parts ticking away, all coiled up spitting and spinning. Times falling away and then coming together at the last minute . . . goodness. Did it have a name? Can’t say it did. Only saw him play it that one night. And everything he was working on was changing titles all the time, anyway. One hour it’d be the If Rag, then turn around and it’d be Lost Boy. Next hour it’d be the Magnetic Rag. Remember Me. Tremble Hand. Hallelujah. Bad Blood. Palms Down. Syncopated Glories. Morning Burl. Seem like they was all getting born up at once—everything he’d had me writing down for all those days and nights. I couldn’t rightly say that all of it was nice sounding. But some of it stuck to me so hard until I could never shake it off. Or maybe it was the way he was playing it—like he was staring down a well. And then sometimes he’d just stop and look at his palms, like he’d brung up a last drink of water. Then he’d just splash it all over that piano. But I can still hear parts of it in my head.(Plays) That was some good stuff right there. ’Cept he’d played it all stiffed up, bar by bar, most the time. Till that one last night. Were you there that night? I was there. Well, naw I wasn’t there. I was supposed to be. See, he had just played that thing. Had played it all out, till there wasn’t no more. He was sweating and heaving at the end like he’d been running for everything he’d ever lost. I remember once he looked up like he’d found some secret in the music, and then he did something he’d rarely do—he sang a little with the tune, like I’m in the wind,  baby. I’m in the wind, darling. He was just twirling them keys all around, you know. Just twinkling up those high notes with big bashes of bass. Then too, I remember there was this one part in the music where he sounded like he’d wandered somewhere deep in the notes and couldn’t find a way back. Well, he found his way back alright. But he just wasn’t the same no more. What happened? How was he different? Well, let me see . . . You ever have someone seem all never-beaten all their life, so never-beaten till it’s like they was never weak? So strong till the day you come to know how weak they are—that’s when you see how you never knew their strength? Well, I had been knowing him for days, weeks, years. All the time knowing ’bout his strength—knowing he would be hitting those keys to the end, even when he was out of it, he’d walk out with his head up. He’d seen worse. Lot worse. See, sometimes he’d be out on the road, playing his set—everything that had got his name on it, his bread and butter. He’d be up there playin it all grand and professor-like, kinda stilted up and slowed down so that the audience could hear every note shimmering in its own museum. He’d love each rag like it was the children he never got to see grow up—he’d be keepin them all orderly and polite, straining up their voices—not so much as they’d break, but enough to hear them bend up a little into hope, no matter how sad they might be. But never rushin nowhere. Folks was all okay with that back when he first started playin that Maple Leaf and such. But it changed. He thought putting those pieces on paper would help hold them the way he heard them—make them stay proper and well behaved. I imagine he was quite eager to get his work published in order to get compensated. Yeah, he was glad to see it out in the world. See, he wanted to leave his sound behind him . . . but see, it didn’t work out quite exactly like that. Once those rags were on paper, every ten-fingered bowler-wearing stud would put his hands all over those tunes. Walk them slow at first, till they learned all their ins and outs. They was polite with them tunes, till they figured out how to roll ’em out a little faster, and then make ’em strut and swagger more with each stride. Next thing you know, they was cakewalking them rags up and down that keyboard like a pimp in the tenderloin. Their fingers would work ’em more faster, more prettier than they was supposed to be—all slicked up and leaned back and sideways steppin—hustled up and tricked out like something illegal, ill tempered and ill-begotten gained. And started to be like every time he went to a new town, there’d be some light-fingered hustler out to bootstrap himself up, using Scott like a ladder. Come up onstage after Scott all friendly, then play his pieces all to pieces. I mean snapping those rags with a shoeshine boy’s spit and polish, trying to make the best tip of the week by showing the master how to work his own business. He’d say in his polite little professor tone, “Very nice, but too fast, friend!” and they’d just laugh. He would laugh with them a little through his frown, too—because what else could he do? And what’s make it worse is that Scott couldn’t keep up with ’em. That ol’ dog syphilis had him by the throat, and had gnawed up almost everything he could do with his hands . . . and every year it got worse , till he would come into town and some folks would think he must’ve been a faker, askin how could the great rag man be all dusted up and unpolished like that? This be Scott Joplin?This? But he never stopped, brother. Never stopped. Would always shake it off, even though you know he’d been shook. Always had a plan—an opera, a show . . . Like Treemonisha,right? Isn’t that what kept him going? Yeah, trying to get that opera up and runnin kept him going for a long time. Years, maybe. But everybody got limits. And that night, he knew he’d just . . . run out of time. He’d played that patchwork blanket of rags for hours and hours that night, all up and down the fingerboard till the air was about beat out the room. And he was breathless. When he looked up you could see there weren’t that many breaths left for him here on this earth, and when I saw his face . . . boy, I just had to ... I had to walk away for a while. I went out that door. Got the night air. Cleaned myself off with wall beneath the streetlights. So . . . you left the building ... Yeah. Only left about twenty minutes or so, walking round the block. Came back and there was a glowing off the roof of the building. Ran up all them stairs, thinking the building was on fire, maybe one of them johns had dropped a cigar on the roof. Got there to see him standing next to this big old metal trash can, all blazed up with his songs. He must’ve put some kerosene on them ’cause they was blazed up pretty high and hot—I could feel the heat off those rags—damn, all them beautiful rags—could feel the heat from ten feet away. And I could see Scott on the other side. His face all lit up, his hands trembling and holding one last stash of scribbled up music. You can’t stop something you know is gonna happen anyway. And then, you still gotta try. And I did. I tried to fix my mouth to talk at him, talk him down from all that mischief the sickness had put up in his brain. But what could I say? All the things you would say in the same situation.Don’t do it, Scott—your voice on paper, your work, think of your bloodline of sound all burning up, man . . . Who gone showthem, man? People need to know . . . You know what he said? What did he say? It was almost like he knew it was coming. This giant hand of wind came right over us from the river. And he threw them rags all up in the air and into the palm of that hand, and it made a fist and smeared his music all over New York. All them notes all scattered over Manhattan like so many raindrops. All them notes burning up in smoke. What’d he say?It’s all in the wind, Sam. It’s all in the wind.

Music is most sovereign because more than anything else, rhythm and harmony find their way to the inmost soul and take strongest hold upon it, bringing with them and imparting grace. —Plato, The Republic The cranes are flying ... —Chekhov And here it comes: around the world, In Chicago, Petersburg, Tokyo, the dancers Hit the floor running (the communal dancefloor Here, there, at intervals, sometimes paved, Sometimes rotted linoleum awash in beer, Sometimes a field across which the dancers streak Like violets across grass, sometimes packed dirt In a township of corrugated metal roofs) And what was once prescribed ritual, the profuse Strains of premeditated art, is now improvisation, The desperately new, where to the sine-curved Yelps and spasms of police sirens outside The club, a spasmodic feedback ululates The death and cremation of history, Until a boy whose hair is purple spikes, And a girl wearing a skull That wants to say I’m cool but I’m in pain, Get up and dance together, sort of, age thirteen. Young allegorists, they’ll mime motions Of shootouts, of tortured ones in basements, Of cold insinuations before sex Between enemies, the jubilance of the criminal. The girl tosses her head and dances The shoplifter’s meanness and self-betrayal For a pair of stockings, a scarf, a perfume, The boy dances stealing the truck, Shooting his father. The point is to become a flying viper, A diving vulva, the great point Is experiment, like pollen flinging itself Into far other habitats, or seed That travels a migrant bird’s gut To be shit overseas. The creatures gamble on the whirl of life And every adolescent body hot Enough to sweat it out on the dance floor Is a laboratory: maybe this lipstick, these boots, These jeans, these earrings, maybe if I flip My hair and vibrate my pelvis Exactly synched to the band’s wildfire noise That imitates history’s catastrophe Nuke for nuke, maybe I’ll survive, Maybe we’ll all survive. . . . At the intersection of poverty and plague The planet's children—brave, uncontrollable, juiced Out of their gourds—invent the sacred dance.

last night locked in the castle of pride and egotism goes on two legs Webern orchestrated a sky the clouds move to a bass on an instrument not an oboe, gray on light-gray in blue and green goes by on glass

She don’t believe in shootin’ stars, but she believe in shoes and cars . . . —Kanye West, “Flashing Lights” Always growing out my bangs, childhood, that strange small. The place written for me invites me to hoarder and not mother, so I’m living in this mirrored chest of drawers called the body—my brother is hidden in there, next to all of 1996. I have predictions for my cancer—colon or breast— a tattoo artist exacting areolas above the dark canals of my heart. Yes . . . I spend too much money, I cheat on everyone I love, I know what it’s like to desire everything & nothing at all, the air inside a potato chip bag. I count the sweaty, greasy envelopes on my nightstand, each a letter for every person I’ve wanted & never had. I don’t trust the guiding powers of stars, but I do believe in the Magic 8 Ball of the city, night the shaken blue inkiness of Signs Point to Yes, Reply Hazy, Try Again, or Outlook Not So Good. My happiness I can point to on a map— New Orleans, legs swinging, red stilettos poking their noses out the window of Big Daddy’s in the French Quarter, gone now, torn down. The strippers’ legs perpetually swinging, each dark fold keeping time.

carnegie hall, october 19, 2014 beauty eludes me, usually. i soak up the lush red, violet, indigo blooms abdullah ibrahim’s cool fingers pluck from the keyboard’s bed, but bring to these ‘rooms’ (stanzas forged from replayed past as today’s not-news) no solacing bouquets. my weeds? i conjure rough green to rupture from seeds so furious they bleed — or, grieving, raise crabgrass and blue notes, peppered with rust, where he grows flowers. yes, i tend my plants incisively : no phrase that droops or wants out of the sun survives long. but the rest run wild, flush vivid, throw shade, deluge fruit, lavishly express their dissonant root.

Whose sense in so evil consort, their stepdame Nature lays, That ravishing delight in them most sweet tunes do not raise; Or if they do delight therein, yet are so cloyed with wit, As with sententious lips to set a title vain on it: O let them hear these sacred tunes, and learn in wonder’s schools, To be (in things past bounds of wit) fools, if they be not fools. Who have so leaden eyes, as not to see sweet beauty’s show, Or seeing, have so wooden wits, as not that worth to know; Or knowing, have so muddy minds, as not to be in love; Or loving, have so frothy thoughts, as eas’ly thence to move: Or let them see these heavenly beams, and in fair letters read A lesson fit, both sight and skill, love and firm love to breed. Hear then, but then with wonder hear; see but adoring see, No mortal gifts, no earthly fruits, now here descended be; See, do you see this face? a face? nay, image of the skies, Of which the two life-giving lights are figured in her eyes: Hear you this soul-invading voice, and count it but a voice? The very essence of their tunes, when Angels do rejoice.

Love comes in spurts. RICHARD HELL & THE VOIDOIDS 1 And goes is gone cause for mourning head in hands in tears gonna be a long long wait for the resurrection of the dead. There are birds there is birdsong unmourning and unmournful at sunrise in the white light there is a garden with high walls around it jardin de plaisir of mint and lavender of hyssop in hedges glassy beads of water on velvet leaves purple-flaked lupin spikes above velvet pulmonaria there is a gardener la belle jardinière bare-breasted and bare-footed bouquets of all flowers in her arms and woven in her hair. 2 And it hurts not good but bad to see a man head in hands in tears it breaks you up to see a man come down in tears. There are birds there is birdsong having come through hunger and danger there is free song a free weaving of many songs song against song and other songs clustered/spun out in a blending of wavy pitches tant doucement the phrase means what the songs mean freshness that meaning so sweetly and freely as a gardener weaves flowers in her hair. 3 Can we stay in the weave of that meaning can we/should we attempt to stay to linger in a pleasure garden everlasting dream of love tomorrow its unseen/secret structure when our time remains a bad time and what time wasn’t bad wasn’t and isn’t a time of hunger and danger of young men and older men in tears our time a time of terror and counterterror can we/should we our time remaining a really bad time a really down and dirty time of terror what walls do not fall and who says they have no fear. 4 And boo-hoo-hoo like dolls hurts breaks you up like dolls get broken the visible human the visibly spastic plastic. There are birds there is birdsong unmourning and unmournful having come through there is a garden with swept gravel paths dream designed/bel et bon designed connecting and interconnecting non brisé where men and women are in contemplation in conversation in one another’s eyes there is a gardener holding her bouquets and holding her skirts like the light like so sweetly woven song like love never for sale.

It was too big to take on the subway so she came to it every day that winter in the room where it waited on one foot, sly seabird. She sat down and opened her hands, parted the wings one by one till it flew ahead of her fingers singing the lame foot skidding on gold. The sun turned its back on the glass and paled as she sat obstinate green-eyed her foot on its foot pumping. The fire died. Snow hissing at the window. Above her head a baroque hailstorm failed in 4/4 time. She sang, unable to hold the bright hinge to her heart. Lame savior she sang. It bowed as she left and sat, chastened by scales, wondering.